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The test and measure aspects that allow for you to be at the top of the curve through methodical approaches to testing .

Bio:

I am married to a wonderful woman -- Jordan -- and am a finger wrapped father to my daughter -- Eden. I live in Lehi, Utah where I recently ran (and lost) for City Council and currently operate Siftable.com.

Blog Bio:

James Green lives in Lehi, Utah and runs Siftable.com a Search Marketing group with a reputation of results.

I can see how, if you aren't in search and know you want to be, this could be confusing when setting up accounts. However, if Google is a long-term strategy you need to research and learn how to manage this in a manner that you can meet your goals. November 11, 2009

Ultimately it just depends on your goals. If you want volume quickly broad match will do it for you but if you want highest relevance and to control costs exact match is the way to go. If you want to balance the two phrase match will get you some tail terms and also increase relevance. November 11, 2009

Would be interesting to build this in a more contextual way such that if other posts have the same incoming keywords you automatically boost those articles higher in a similar articles section. By doing this you build a tighter web of thematic seo and increase your thumbprint on a group of longtail keywords.

This is interesting that the blog would drive such a high percentage. I like the idea of thematic content to garner long tail traffic and blogs certainly help to facilitate siloing content in a way to boost relevance. October 20, 2009

I agree that in the face of not knowing how to get from page 2 to page 1 copying someone else is better than nothing. However, doing what worked for someone yesterday may not be enough to get ahead tomorrow October 20, 2009

Are you thinking of Domain Authority or history of a domain? Most consider domain authority to be the value Google assigns based on quality of inbound links (PageRank with relevancy) and others discuss the merits of having an older domain. My personal thinking and findings are that age plays very little, if at all, and domain authority is extremely important. October 19, 2009

Not sure I agree wordslinger. Why is the intent of a searcher different based on clicking on the paid link or organic link? If I find what I am looking for and the page description matches my interest I usually click on the organic listing because I have a sense it will be more relevant than the eBay listing for the same product. Perhaps I'm not looking at this the right way.

What is the position of the paid keyword and the position of the organic keyword and are you looking at exact match forms of the paid search terms or another match type? This is potentially very interesting but may not be as conclusive as the data would have you believe depending on the answers to these questions.

Either way this is a great way to look at the world and important to be testing and measuring this. Thanks.

One thing to be sure - you need to offer value to users on that page. Otherwise they'll go to result #2, 3, 4, etc... looking for a coupon code that works and provides them real value. Larger advertisers might even consider restricting affiliates from offering coupon codes unless they are seeing value from it. October 19, 2009

Are you talking about varying your anchor text through out your internal linking to the same page? If so, would this make your linking look more spammy than less? If I were looking at this from a search engine's point of view I would expect that you would know what a page is about and consistently refer to it that way. Thoughts? October 17, 2009

It's like a train wreck I can't stop watching. I just keep turning back and watching. As I was digging around other user profiles I'm surprised by how few of the members are still active when looking through old users. October 07, 2009

I was thinking, I really like SEOMoz with the insightful posts and the community that exists here. If you are interested I would love to write you a testimonial you could publish on the the site if you'd like - just let me know and I'll send something over. I'd love to share with your visitors the value that I've received from being an SEOMoz member. :)

Another great article Rand. Curious if you have had any negative reception to sending the link when they didn't ask for it.

On other's points, linking does not constitute a form of payment and as a result doesn't fall under the pervue of the FCC's recent rulings. In-kind payments (money, gifts, etc...) are what is really being scrutinized because influence is gained through monetary efforts such that it creates an uneven playing field. That however isn't to say you can't do it but that you have to disclose it.

Anyone know how blatant your disclosure has to be? Can you bury your disclosure in T's and C's or does it have to be on a post/review?

To other's points, I think this is a 90% of effort spent on these and 10% spent on directories, link exchanges, asking other webmasters to link to you etc... No one source of white-hat links should be overlooked. October 12, 2009

Also use social media to turn your content viral. Whether you have "Share This" type buttons or you have a 1,000 twitter followers who would love to hear about your content you can create buzz on top of having buzzworthy content. October 12, 2009

I would actually imagine that your S-curve on the first graph (Competition vs tactics) would start higher since the sooner you do it the more you are protected as competition increases. I guess that would be hard to show on a static graph though.

It was nice of her to do the interview and give feedback. I always love how open Google tries to be (Bing has started doing better with this too) but just wish there was more meat. I don't expect them to, nor do I actually want them to, tell us too much. At any rate thanks Jen and Maile. October 09, 2009

Having a good process to find out needs and expectations can go a long way. And may be best to not take a client if it seems client expectations are too high or that they lack the understanding of the commitment needed to succeed with SEO. October 09, 2009

This is great. I hope you are sharing this kind of info with your clients to show them the way that you are analyzing and working to improve their rankings. I know this helps em and forces me to make sure I am being as analytical as possible. October 08, 2009

Has anyone read through the recent FTC decision that bloggers who endorse products must disclose payments? I wonder how far that goes and how that would impact some of the incentives you might give to build links. October 08, 2009

As part of the contest idea, ask users to blog about your product/service and who ever comes up with the best idea (could be community moderated) wins a free something or the company agrees to create within reason the new product/feature. October 05, 2009

Agreed, but I still wish they would make them more sellable (cross-promotion of other Adobe products) to increase revenue per page. I guess the page look would probably become less Adobelike and not play well with their brand vision. October 07, 2009

Thutzler I wonder if there are cousin industries to you that may have an interest in your product/services that would be interested in reviewing and/or have link opportunities. If not, perhaps you should start a review section of your site and create new keyword possibilities for you to rank for. Perhaps those other companies will link to you if you are reviewing them and then in return also review your product. Just a thought. October 07, 2009

This along with the developer's guide to SEO are both fantastic tools for training a company's internal staff on making sure SEO is taken into consideration throughout the development process. October 06, 2009

I don't think its wrong to under-promise. It certainly is hard to draw a line in the sand becuase of the large external factors that go into SEO. Ultimately the point of doing an upside or a benchmark is to try to align expectations and incentives. There are other ways to do that and each company (on both sides) need to understand their own needs and find a group that fits those needs. Because one-size doesn't always fit all. October 05, 2009

Sounds like you are sharing all the right info. Are you asking them to do performance based compensation or an out-clause based on missing these metrics? You'll likely have a very hard time getting someone to take this on a performance basis, though offering upside if they surpass a goal may be a good approach. I don't think any good SEO would take issue with you having an out-clause if they fail to hit certain metrics (assuming they understand how the metric is determined). Hope that helps. October 05, 2009

Always be careful about what data you make available to third parties. Especially those you don't know and trust.

It all depends on how you measure success internally. I'd say determine whether they need to drive a certain percentage increase in visitors while staying withing 10%(or whatever you feel is fair) of your current conversion rates. There are lots of ways to skin a cat when it comes to determining what success is.

Depending on how closely you want to hold them accountable you will need to open data up such as what leywords drive volume, how much volume, the breadth of keywords, current rankings, and if you have paid search accounts looking at how many impressions are available.

If you want an SEO agency to set goals and objectives and to give you more concrete answers you should have them sign an NDA and open up your internal data to them so they can assess the capacity for growth and ROI. October 04, 2009

I'd even say an informed client is just as important. When we have had fewer resources internally we hired SEO consultants who never shared what they were doing or how it was really performing. Needless to say the relationship didn't last long. October 02, 2009

I believe there is a difference between simplifying the focus of a page and removing content. You can still have enough text to explain the product. Shopify (an example above) is probably a fair example. September 29, 2009

I think those companies that do this well make sure that the page is detailed enough to explain who/what they are but still limits the options you have. On the flip-side there are a lot of companies (some SEO companies too) that are multifocused where you still can't really tell what they do or offer (even on their about us page):D September 29, 2009

I think your comments are a better example of why site owners should be more cautious of where they link off to. In the example of a better business bureau listing that is probably one of the better places to link when blogging/writing about a company that you wouldn't want to receive positive link flow. Ultimately the ecosystem of users will determine how well sites rank and not Google, Yahoo, and MSN. September 28, 2009

Now this side of the discussion is where this topic gets interesting. When reputation mangement is an algorithmic weight to each inbound link and how you prevent this from being abused by companies and competitors. Certainly the Cash4gold example is a huge opportunity for abuse if they maintain similar content they'll likely carry much of the SEO value forward with a proper redirect. September 28, 2009

Am I missing something here? Aren't you really just saying that getting links virally is good? I doubt anyone would disagree with that. Not trying to be a contrarian just think I must be missing something here. September 27, 2009

I think these are all great points and think my philosohpies on these line up pretty closely with yours. This goes backt o the idea of driving substance/results rather than just traffic. September 25, 2009

I think it actually comes down to how well you can sell the value of SEO. I imagine after sometime you'll have the executive team fully on board with SEO and things will pick up much more. Certainly this can be harder to do in a large corporation but its still the ultimate hurdle to making work life easier.

I work at a smaller company and when I first started SEO was not a big priority to the General Manager of our sites. Now that I'm the General Manager we spend a lot more time focused on SEO and allocate more resources to it because not only do I understand the value but so do the people above me.

Great post. One thing I wonder if you could clarify, are any of these numbers normalized? I don't think they are but really think this would flip some of the conclusions on their head. As an example if 38 of the articles were list posts and received 2,023 in-linking domains it would say that per popular list post 53.24 (2,023/38) domains would link in per post. Where the 112 non-list posts got 4.960 in-linking domains that only equates to 44.49 (4960/112) domains linking in per post.

Just some food for thought. Again, great post and this is some really interesting stuff.